Dream Eater
by justicemuffins
Summary: He has a name, a real name, he thinks, but he'd forgotten it a very long time ago. He's spent far too long as a man to recall it.


**I don't even know what I'm doing with this one. It was an idea that popped into mind that I decided to play with a little and see if I could get something I might like to toy with later. I still like the idea, I'm just not crazy about my execution. So maybe I'll fool around with it a little more in the future.**

**I'm not even going to bother to put an official disclaimer here because ROW ROW FIGHT THE POWAH.**

* * *

He has a name, a real name, he thinks, but he'd forgotten it a very long time ago. He's spent far too long as a man to recall it. That should bother him, and at one time, perhaps it did, but no longer. He has grown too comfortable in this skin, too comfortable as Phillip J. Coulson to be anyone—or anything—else.

But he is. He is something else. It's a part of him that can't be ignored any more than a bird ignores its wings or a shark its teeth.

Nick Fury is one of the few to have known he wasn't looking into the eyes of a man when they first met. Perhaps that's why he asked Phil to join S.H.I.E.L.D. in the first place; because Phil could be relied upon not to be swayed by the emotions that others would be. Those of his kind had to be naturally detached. Connections of the heart were dangerous, unwanted, they interfered with the natural order of things. He couldn't afford to be discriminatory.

If he was honest about the whole thing, Nick had intrigued him. He had seen men's wars, had fought in them, watched men suffer and die, had lain in muddy ditches listening as men—boys, really—rolled in puddles of their own blood and waste and cried for their mothers. This was a different sort of war.

Phil thinks the change may have begun when he joined S.H.I.E.L.D. but really it had been nearly fifty years prior. It had begun with Steve Rogers. Humans were fascinating creatures, no doubt, but Rogers had captivated him in a way that none before or after ever could. No one man should be that pure, that righteous. And yet there he'd been.

Then Rogers had gone and sunk himself in the Arctic. And, to his great surprise, Phil had found himself… compromised. Compromised had been the only word he could think of to describe the feeling. The fate of mortal men was not his concern, but this one mortal man had been an exception.

He had tucked that particular feeling away until he'd joined S.H.I.E.L.D. but something about the organization had, instead of burying that change further, teased it out of him. It had caused the change to grow, to spread, like one of those dreadful human maladies for which there was no cure. Worst of all was the fact that he didn't find himself all that bothered. Even as he forgot who he was and where he'd come from and lost more and more of himself to Phil Coulson, he couldn't bring himself to care all that much.

That's when it had started.

Nick discovered Phil's true nature due to, of all things, an act of kindness. For some reason or another, the Director's frequent nightmares began to bother Phil. To the point where what should have been done as a simple necessity to himself became something he did out of a desire to end the suffering of someone who he was, perhaps, the closest thing he had ever had to a friend. Of course, this couldn't continue for long without Nick noticing. And notice he did.

* * *

"I've never asked before," Nick says, calling him into his office late one night, "but I think it's about time you told me what you are."

Phil considers this before sitting beside Nick on the sofa with a nod. No one had ever asked. People have suspected, he thinks, but none had been as shrewd or possessed the gall that this particular man did.

"Yes, perhaps you're right," he agrees.

"I noticed I seem to fall asleep just after you come into my office to tell me to leave for the night," Nick tells him. "And for some fucking reason, the best damn sleep I can get is in that chair at my desk. Because I don't have nightmares there. I thought being at HQ had something to do with it, you know, some bullshit about feeling safer. But no. I noticed it only happens when _you're_ around. I'm not superstitious by any means, but I've seen way too much freaky shit in my time to discount anything. So what are you?"

Phil hesitates a beat, trying to think of how he wants to go about this. There's no getting around it now, so he has to come out with it, but he finds himself _worried_, of all things, about how it would be received. But Nick Fury has given himself something he's never had before, so he supposes there's some reciprocity in order.

"In Asiatic mythology they call us Baku. I've heard in Latin American countries we're known as carbuncles. I'm sure there are other names for us, but I haven't bothered to find out," Phil relates to him calmly. "I eat nightmares."

The look Nick gives him is of that Please-hold-while-I-determine-whether-or-not-you're-talking-bullshit variety and Phil is happy to wait while the Director works it out. In some way, it feels good to have finally said it. To perhaps have someone understand. It's been a very long time. Well… he thinks anyway. Was there someone who'd understood before? Maybe he's mistaken.

"You eat nightmares," Nick repeats.

"Yes," Phil answers.

Nick gives him an appraising look. "How old are you?"

Phil looks down. "Old."

"But how old?"

Phil shrugs helplessly. "I don't remember."

"Right," Nick says, rubbing a hand across his chin. "I'm assuming Phillip J. Coulson isn't your real name, then."

"No, it isn't," Phil replies.

"So what is?"

"I've forgotten."

"How do you forget your name?"

"I've been a man for a very long time," Phil says, shaking his head. "We're not supposed to be."

"So shifting form into a man for too long causes you to forget," Nick clarifies.

"Not exactly, it's more… We aren't like you. Humans are very, very different from my kind. We protect you from the things you can't protect yourselves from and we're good at it because it's just a food source to us. There's no feeling attached to your nightmares, no empathy for your suffering," Phil says, leaning back in his seat. "But I think that the reason we're not meant to take human form for as long as I have is that it can't stay that way. There can't be that detachment, that non-discrimination when you begin to understand man, to think like him."

"To feel like him," Nick adds.

Phil nods solemnly.

"So why haven't you gone back, if this is such a problem?" Nick wants to know.

"I'm not sure that it is," Phil answers. "I mean, to the rest of my kind, it is, but not to me, I don't think. I remember… I was dissatisfied with my existence. I wanted change. Something more. I was envious, perhaps, of mortal men."

"Are you _im_mortal?" Nick asks.

"Not exactly. If I wished to be, perhaps," Phil says. "To die, two things must occur: I have to wish for my own destruction and there must be someone to take my place."

"Someone. Someone human?" Nick asks with a raised eyebrow.

"Yes, humans can become Baku. But it must be a human who similarly longs for destruction."

"That makes no fucking sense at all."

Phil smiles. "No, I don't suppose it would."

They sit in silence for a time. Phil wonders what the other is thinking. There's really nothing that Nick can do to him that will be of any consequence; he's just told him that he can't die, so even if Nick wanted that, he couldn't make it happen. Not permanently, anyway. And yet, that thought makes him feel… Well, it makes him _feel_. He feels a sort of sadness. He doesn't want to leave, to be chased away. He doesn't want Nick to reject him.

"Can you still take your original form?" Nick asks.

That gets Phil smirking. "You want to see."

"Only so I know I'm not fucking crazy for listening to all this," Nick says.

Phil shrugs. Shifting takes more concentration than it used to. Where before it had been as easy as slipping in or out of a pool of water, now it feels like he's stuck in a lake of thick molasses. It's become a chore to slip back into his own skin.

He is small, even for his kind, he knows, so in the end he's seated on the cushion staring up at Nick and waiting for the verdict. Nick stares. It's probably strange for him to be staring at this small, brown, short-haired creature.

"What the fuck is that?" he asks. "You look like a pig. With an anteater's face."

_"You call them tapir,"_ Phil says indignantly, laying his ears flat.

"Am I supposed to be hearing your voice in my head?" Nick asks.

_"It's natural, just relax,"_ Phil assures him. _"Now, you see these white horizontal stripes? Typically they're only found on tapir infants. I'm about the same size, but most of my kind are far larger. We all possess these markings. So if you ever see a very large tapir with white stripes, chances are you're looking at a Baku."_

"And that's as big as you'll get?" Nick inquires.

_"As I said, I'm small for my kind,"_ Phil answers.

"So you're a runt."

Phil tries not to sigh.

_"Yes, I'm a runt."_

"Okay, Runt, so what do you want?" Nick asks, folding his arms over his chest.

Phil cocks his head at angle. _"What do I want?"_

"You heard me. There has to have been a reason that you decided to come here," Nick says. "I want to know exactly what it is you're looking to get out of remaining with S.H.I.E.L.D."

_"I can stay?"_

Nick leans toward him. "Did you think I was going to kick you out?"

_"I wasn't sure."_

The grin on the Director's face is eerie in the dim light. He sees a flash of teeth and little else. "Please. You think you're the strangest thing to walk through my door?"

Well, that explains a lot. As he sits and contemplates the matter, he finds he feels uncomfortable. Something's off. With a deep breath, he focuses on shifting his form until he's Phil Coulson once again and something clicks. If he weren't so preoccupied, he might have laughed: he felt uncomfortable in his true form. His own skin made him feel ill at ease. He wonders what any others of his kind might think of him, if they could see the sad creature he's become; the poor little dream eater who wanted so desperately to be human and can only manage a pale imitation. And yet he feels no shame. He knows he will gladly live the rest of his life as this something in-between because the thought of returning to that meaningless existence he had lived prior has become painful.

"I'd just like to stay. That's all."

"Then you can stay," Nick says, leaning back in his seat once more.

So Phil stays.

* * *

He loses more the longer he stays, but he gains something in return. Years pass so that his actions are less mimicry and more habit, less practiced and more instinct. Yet he can never really shed his true nature. So he uses it for a different purpose: aiding those around him.

It's in this way that he learns about the people he calls his coworkers, who he comes to think of as friends. He takes their nightmares and as such is privy to their deepest fears, their secrets. Clint Barton and Natasha Romanoff and Jasper Sitwell and Maria Hill and Nick Fury, he knows them all. He continues to add people to his list, like Pepper Potts and Tony Stark. None of them know, of course. Afghanistan is something he's sure Stark would never part with willingly; the nightmare is as dry and bitter in taste as the desert is in reality. It's like sand in his mouth.

He finds that, curiously, the nightmares of the people he spends the most time with begin to become difficult to swallow. More often than not, he finds himself with an upset stomach. They don't taste as sweet or as sumptuous as they used to. Curiously, the nightmares of strangers remain as light and delicious as he remembers.

Perhaps this is why they say his kind are not meant to play man for so long; you get too close to the thing you're imitating and you slowly starve.

* * *

Phil sits in a stiff-backed chair, regarding the orb between his fingers with a sort of weariness. He's taken it from the man in the bed before him. If there's anyone's mind he's ever wanted to reach into and pluck a nightmare from, it's Steve Rogers. Especially now. Seventy years in the ice means these particular nightmares have aged like a fine wine.

"You seemed quite the eager beaver earlier," Nick says from the doorway.

Phil frowns at the orb. "I'm not hungry."

He hears a disbelieving laugh from the doorway. "You're always hungry."

Phil shoots his old friend a flat stare over his shoulder, but Nick just grins and walks over. He looks down at the orb between Phil's fingers and they both stare, for a time, at the swirling patterns and colors, unique to each individual and type of nightmare.

"Not this time," Phil sighs.

"Too much feeling for you?" Nick asks.

Phil nods. But he either eats it or puts it back and, looking at the slumbering face of Captain America, free of grief and pain at least for the time being, he knows he _can't_ put it back. So he takes a deep breath, knocks his head back and swallows it whole with a grimace. With a soft groan, he places a hand on his stomach, feeling cramps setting in almost immediately.

"That bad?" Nick queries with a raised eyebrow.

"Awful," Phil answers. "But worth it."

"I imagine he's probably going to have a lot of them in the future."

"Maybe I should invest in a bottle of antacids," Phil jokes.

"You can't stop them all, Phil," Nick reminds him.

"No," Phil agrees. "But I can try."

He can see that Nick would like very much to argue with him, but that urge quickly goes out the window. Their arguments never last long and that's the point; Nick can't be bothered to waste the breath on them.

"You're not looking so good," Nick notes.

"I feel sick," Phil says. "I think. I'm pretty sure this is what sick feels like."

"Well, how about you go feel sick while lying down in your quarters," Nick says, helping him up from his seat.

"But the Captain—"

"Will be looked after until you come back. Do _not_ argue with me, Coulson, I'm not in the mood," Nick says, all but dragging him towards the door.

Phil goes along with it, if only because he's determined to come back later.

* * *

Of course he wouldn't be dead. He'd told Nick himself that he couldn't die unless he wanted it, regardless of what Loki had tried to do to him. But then… he _had_ wanted it, hadn't he? Because they'd needed it, they'd needed him to die. So as he'd bled out against the wall, he'd wished for destruction. But the problem with that was there was no one around to take his place, so of course he'd lived.

He's warm now, nestled in something soft, but he hurts. He knows pain, has felt it in the past, but not like this. Still, there's someone stroking his fur and oh, that's nice, no one's done that since Nick had after that one op in Albania—

Phil cracks an eye open and when his vision focuses, he rather wishes he hadn't.

Because he's reverted to his true form and is currently resting on a pillow in Steve Roger's lap and the good captain is gently scratching behind his ears and oh god he's not ready for this. But when he tries to move, pain ripples through his left side, wringing a startled chirp out of him.

"Hey, no moving just yet," Rogers advises him.

He wouldn't ever think of going against the captain's wishes were the situation under control, but the situation was most definitely not under control. He squirms, despite how much it hurts, despite the haze over his mind from the drugs in his system and the startling realization that he's perhaps become closer to being mortal than he'd ever thought he would.

"Whoa there, Phil, how about we take this whole conscious thing one step at a time, huh?"

Stark. It's Stark. He squirms harder, yelps in pain when Steve tries to hold him in place, hears the man's hurried apology.

"Agent Coulson, you calm the fuck down," Nick barks at him.

He stops. That's an order and he's not about to disobey, regardless of the situation. He collapses back onto the pillow, suddenly aware of the bulk of bandages wrapped around his torso and the IV line leading to one of his legs.

"It's okay, Phil. Director Fury's explained the whole thing to us."

Phil glances up to look at Pepper Potts and sees she's surrounded by the Avengers. The assembled Avengers. It worked. It had really worked. But they could see him now for what he really was.

_"I didn't want you to see me like this,"_ Phil says quietly.

"Considering you've seen most of us when we didn't want to be seen by anyone, I'd say we're even," Clint says.

_"Barton?"_ he murmurs, lifting his head.

"Right here, boss," Clint answers him.

He relaxes. Clint's okay. Well, okay as he can tell at the moment. He's guessing that's not really okay, but he's back, anyway. He shifts on the pillow, sighing. He's tired. He hurts.

"Sir, for what it's worth, no one here is bothered by what you are," Rogers is saying from above him. "And if anything, we should be thanking you."

_"I'm not sure I understand, Captain."_

"Remember when Pep said Fury had told us everything? Well, she meant everything," Stark says. "We know what you do and what you've been doing."

_"Oh. You weren't supposed to."_

He sleeps again. Sleeping isn't something he does a lot of, but it really isn't half-bad. He can see why humans like it so much. He wakes again an undetermined amount of time later. But the room is empty and he breathes a sigh of relief for that. He's not sure he's ready to face them all again.

"Awake again, Agent Coulson?"

Okay, so the room is mostly empty. He really doesn't like these pain killers, they throw him off his game. It's sad when you don't notice a presence as commanding as Steve Rogers in the room.

_"Yes, I'm awake, Captain."_

"We're not on duty here, you can call me Steve," Rogers tells him.

_"…in that case, perhaps you should call me Phil,"_ Phil says. He's curious about something, but not sure how to ask so he just comes out with it. _"You can't tell me that you all believed Fury straight away."_

Steve chuckles. "No, we… had a bit of an argument over it, actually. But it's hard to argue with proof."

_"Still, I can't imagine everyone's just accepted this,"_ Phil says, his eyes sliding shut again as the soldier's fingers scratch the brim of his nose.

"Maybe not just yet," Steve answers. "But I think we prefer it to the alternative."

_"And you?"_ Phil finds himself asking.

"I've seen too many strange things in my life to think too much of it," Steve replies. "And it explains why I've had so many nightmares since you were… injured."

That's not something he likes to hear. As unpleasant and difficult to stomach as those nightmares had been, he doesn't like the thought of having left the soldier to deal with them himself. He hears Steve clear his throat.

"Should I… not be petting you?" Steve asks.

_"Hmm?"_ Phil hums drowsily.

Steve is petting him. Again. He'd be embarrassed if he weren't so sleepy and it didn't feel so damn good. Part of him wonders why Steve is doing this in the first place, the other part doesn't care so long as he keeps doing it.

"I started petting you and I didn't really consider that maybe you might find it offensive," Steve says, pausing with his hand hovering over Phil's head.

_"I hadn't thought about it, but… it's nice,"_ Phil admits, closing his eyes with a soft sigh. _"Thank you."_

Steve doesn't say anything to that, just goes on petting him. Eventually Steve tells him that they've had someone with him at all times, working in shifts. He learns that they've decided to remain a team, on the condition that Phil will serve as their liaison as soon as he's recovered.

He can't think of anything he'd like more.

_"You're what made me want to be human,"_ Phil says suddenly when he's close to sleep again.

"Me?" Steve says, his tone disbelieving.

_"I'd worn the skin of a man for a very long time before you came along. I knew I wanted change, but I didn't know why or how to do it. I didn't start to change until… until you made me really want to,"_ Phil answers. _"I wanted to know what it felt like to care as much as you did. I didn't understand it."_

Steve is silent and he wonders if he's said too much. He normally doesn't say this much, prefers to keep to himself, but something's coaxing it out of him. The drugs, he thinks. He's always loopy when they set him up on painkillers.

"Well," Steve says at length, resting his hand atop Phil's head. "Mission accomplished."

* * *

They all allow him to continue his work, taking their nightmares and bringing sleep when they need it most. He's comfortable enough now to take his true form when he's tired out, unashamed of letting them see. In those instances, he always winds up near someone; he curls up on Steve's chest or Pepper's lap or beside Tony and Bruce in the workshop or Clint in the vents or Natasha on the sofa or beside Jasper or Maria when they fill out reports. No one thinks anything of it. And if he finds Steve petting the back of his head, even in human form, he's not complaining.

"Do you remember what you asked me when you found out what I was?" Phil asks, laying a stack of reports on Nick's desk one day.

"No," Nick says bluntly.

"You asked me what I wanted," Phil reminds him.

"Yeah? And did you find it, Runt?" Nick asks, sipping from his coffee cup as he surveys the reports.

Phil can see him grinning. He dips his head in a nod.

"Yes, I think so."


End file.
